CHAPTER XI.
Early the next morning, in Mrs.Baxter's parlance,--that is to say, some little time before the sun had reached the meridian,--she was ringing Adelaide's door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the brass knobs on the railing.

In this she had a double motive: what was evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.
Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor's name was brought up.

Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside, and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him.

How extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought.

She heard her own tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about Mathilde--anxieties with which, of course, one couldn't bother a poor sick creature.